This application relates to shipping storage containers and more particularly to containers in which the base of the container serves as a reusable pallet.
Various container designs have been employed to ship and store industrial goods. In many instances the containers are stored in large warehouse facilities where they are moved from one location to another by fork-lift trucks or the like. One commonly used container incorporates a corrugated sleeve which is nailed to a conventional wooden pallet. The sleeve forms the side walls of the container and the pallet serves as its bottom. The use of the wooden pallets, however, have some drawbacks. For example, they are subject to breakage and thus are not reusable over an extended period of time. Wooden pallets also take up a considerable amount of valuable floor space in the warehouse when they are not in use.
In an effort to solve some of the problems with the wooden pallets, reusable plastic pallets have been employed with some degree of success. Such pallets have been combined with a corrugated sleeve to form a container. The plastic pallet and sleeve are reusable and may be compactly stacked when not in use, thereby providing significant advantages over conventional wooden pallets. U.S. Pat. No. 4,254,873 to Cooke III et al. is a representative example of such a composite container design.
These composite container designs also have their drawbacks. The edges of the sleeve merely rest in grooves in the pallet in most of the known designs. Consequently, some additional means must be provided to hold them together prior to shipping. Generally the pallet and corrugated sleeve are banded together by steel bands or cords encircling the components. This banding process introduces an additional expense in both time and money since the container must not only be bound prior to shipping but must also be unbound before the container contents can be removed.
In an effort to eliminate the expense and inconvenience of the banding process, various proposals have been made to facilitate the releasable attachment of the sleeve to the pallet. In one such proposal, as shown for example in applicant's co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 080,230, a plurality of latches are slidably mounted on the pallet at circumferentially spaced locations around the periphery of the pallet for coaction with a plurality of slots provided at circumferentially spaced locations around the periphery of the sleeve adjacent the lower edge of the sleeve. With this arrangement, the sleeve may be releasably secured to the pallet by resting the lower edge of the sleeve on the pallet with the latches withdrawn inwardly and thereafter sliding the latches outwardly and through the corresponding slots in the lower edge portion of the sleeve to releasably secure the sleeve to the pallet. Whereas this sliding latch/slot arrangement has proven to be generally satisfactory, the area in and around the slot in the sleeve, after extended periods of usage, has tended to become damaged with a consequent derogation in the effective operation of the latch mechanism.